The two largest private prison companies are cashing in as the Trump administration scales up its detention and deportation operations.
They don’t expect the funds to stop flowing anytime soon.
GEO Group founder George Zoley said the company was prepared for “unprecedented growth opportunities” during its second-quarter earnings call Wednesday, and CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger described the current moment as “unprecedented” during the company’s earnings call Thursday.
CoreCivic reported total revenue topping $538 million during the second quarter, up 9.8% from the same period last year, and a net income of $38.5 million, a 103.4% increase.
The GEO Group reported $1.24 billion in total revenue during the first six months of 2025 compared to $1.21 billion during the same period in 2024, and recently authorized $300 million in stock buybacks.
The second quarter ended just before President Donald Trump signed into law $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention centers.
“This funding is a historic increase in funding provided to ICE for border security and immigration detention, which we know will further drive demand for the solutions we provide,” Hininger said.
Both GEO Group and CoreCivic have positioned themselves well to capitalize on the moment, including by investing in politics, particularly Republican candidates and committees.
A recent analysis by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning good governance watchdog, found “CoreCivic and GEO Group, and their subsidiaries and executives, donated nearly $2.8 million to Trump’s 2024 election efforts and inaugural fund.”
Individuals and PACs affiliated with the companies have continued to make big contributions in 2025. In April, Zoley gave $100,000 to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Grow the Majority joint fundraising committee, according to recent disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Shares in CoreCivic and GEO Group both skyrocketed after Trump, who campaigned on cracking down on illegal immigration, was elected in November 2024. CoreCivic’s shares got another bump after it released its second-quarter earnings. GEO Group’s, curiously, took a bit of a hit despite optimism among executives about the path forward, although the share price remains well above its November value.
Nearly 57,000 individuals were being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers as of July 27, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center affiliated with Syracuse University. GEO Group says ICE is using 20,000 beds at its facilities, and CoreCivic said its “ICE populations” increased 28% in the first six months of the year to “just over 13,000.”
The Trump administration this spring set a target of 3,000 arrests by ICE per day, although the Justice Department has reportedly denied that figure in court, seeming to contradict public statements by officials including White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and border czar Tom Homan.
Zoley said Wednesday that the GEO Group is already seeing “the highest level of ICE utilization in our company’s history.”
“During the second quarter of this year, the utilization across our current ICE contracts has increased from approximately 15,000 beds to 20,000 beds at 21 facilities,” Zoley said. “This represents more than one-third of the current ICE detention levels.”
Immigration detention center capacity is expected to nearly double to 100,000 beds following an influx of funding to ICE.
GEO Group also expects potential changes to the scale of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, an ICE program that monitors individuals who are not detained but have pending immigration cases. BI, a GEO Group subsidiary, is currently the sole provider of the agency’s electronic monitoring and case management services.
“We believe that the lack of growth in ISAP has been primarily driven by an intense focus from ICE on increasing and maximizing the utilization of detention capacity. Once detention capacity is maximized by the end of the year, we speculate that the focus will likely shift to increasing the use of GPS tracking,” Zoley said.
An ICE spokesperson declined to discuss potential interest in scaling up the program, but told NOTUS that the agency “is exploring all options to meet its current and future immigration enforcement requirements.”
“We continue to make a significant number of arrests that require greater detention capacity or supervision in non-detained settings,” the ICE spokesperson said.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to include a statement from ICE.